I need to back-up around 40GB of photographs from an old hard-drive (8+ years old) to a brand-new external one.

I'm a little bit wary about the stability of such an old hard-drive. It has not sustained a huge amount of use, (as is evident from the fact it still works at all), but I'm still a little bit concerned that something might go wrong during the backup, resulting in permanent data loss (and priceless data at that)!

The drive appears to function fine and is about as fast as you would expect an 8 year old hard-drive to be. I just want to be really careful as photographs are, like I say, priceless. Are there any precautions I should take?

(In case you were curious, neither the hard-drive nor the data are mine. I am doing this procedure for a relative .)

If it's an IDE drive, 8+ years, you're lucky that it still works at all. I would try doing the backup through Linux though. If your drive happens to fail, you can always send the drive to the manufacturer to get the data recovered and they usually do an okay job from my experience. I had a drive that wouldn't spin at all, and I got all of my data back from it (SeaGate).

(01-24-2015, 12:09 PM)AceInfinity Wrote: I would try doing the backup through Linux though.

You mean I should boot into Linux (Ubuntu?) to do the backup. What is the advantage of this?

(01-24-2015, 12:09 PM)AceInfinity Wrote: If your drive happens to fail, you can always send the drive to the manufacturer to get the data recovered and they usually do an okay job from my experience. I had a drive that wouldn't spin at all, and I got all of my data back from it (SeaGate).

If the worst comes to the worst, I will explore that avenue. Thank you.

The advantage is that Linux reads the raw data whereas Windows requires a proper recognized file format. Additionally, your drives aren't fragmented (nearly as much) by the use of Linux either. If that drive is full, then you're probably going to run into fragmentation issues regardless among many other problems, thus why it's better to use Linux, especially in such a case. Linux uses good allocation algorithms in which minimize fragmentation so it typically doesn't become a problem, unlike windows, which uses considerably one of the lesser quality allocation algorithms for upwards of about 20 years now.

Would it be reasonable to boot from USB into Ubuntu and do the backup from there? I have used Ubuntu to format a drive before and I used a certain program that was recommended to me. Is there any particular program I should use in this case?

I don't see why not... any Live CD can do the same too. I'm pretty sure though that it wouldn't be as effective or fast as having it installed on an SSD with plenty of storage, but it does the trick for me in emergency cases (a live CD).

Format though? I thought you just wanted to backup files to another location? Or do you want to format afterwards as well? There's plenty of disk utilities that come preinstalled on most basic Linux distros. I'm no Linux expert, but the tools that come with Mint work well enough for me. I've tested a few others including elementary OS, but Ubuntu probably has even more since it's been around longer than a few other Linux distros.

(01-24-2015, 04:10 PM)AceInfinity Wrote: I thought you just wanted to backup files to another location? Or do you want to format afterwards as well?

I have no intention to format this drive -- when the data is safe, the drive, and its accompanying components, are all going in the bin. I simply mean that I have used some disc utilities in the past to format drives and wounder if there is a similar utility well-suited for the tasks at hand. I will have to do some more research on the matter.

Thank you very much for your guidance, Ace.

I don't intend on backing up the drive until some time next week so, if anyone else wants to weight in, please do !